Nothing makes a faraway tragedy real faster than discovering, quite unexpectedly, that the faces of the shocked victims in the news are familiar to you.
I'm used to looking at pictures of strangers in the news, whether or not the occasion is a tragic one--seeing only the emotions and not knowing who they are. As of yesterday morning, the Boston Marathon bombings have become an exception.
It's a shock to hear about any attack, of course. It's always shocking, no matter how often it happens (and it happens much too often now!), to open a news source or be contacted by a friend who is better-informed than I am and find that someone else has decided to kill people for no particular reason. But it's a different kind of shock to find a news article headed with a picture of some of my friends.
Wednesday, April 17, 2013
Thursday, April 11, 2013
Counterintuitive Homework Solution!
If you are reading this, you have probably noticed that this is my first post since January, and thence deduced that my skills at keeping up a blogging schedule have proven to be abysmal.
If you had seen my grades at the midterm, you would also see that my skills at keeping up with homework have proven to be similarly abysmal for similar reasons.
For this reason, I have decided to solve both these problems at once... by blogging about my homework. Instead of doing it? No, in order to MAKE myself do it. (I may also end up copying over the blog posts mandated for my biology class to this blog, because if I'm going to work that hard I want to be able to go back and see it again!)
So, here I shall implement my counterintuitive solution to the problem of homework by describing what I have accomplished today.
This morning, I took two tests: one as part of my computer science class this semester, and one immediately after class to prove that I was ready for computer science class next semester. I passed both with fairly good grades, and successfully registered for the next computer science course! Unfortunately, my attempts to register for any courses other than that and Latin have proven fruitless; I'll be talking with a professor to see if I can solve that one tomorrow. (It doesn't make sense; I tried registering for two different sections of Spanish, four or so of physics, and two of math, and it told me they were all full even though I checked repeatedly and the other page claimed there were many seats available! Oh, well... the programming class and love-of-my-life-Latin worked out fine, so it's not too bad.)
My theatre homework has started getting easy on me. I have abruptly gone from utter bafflement and uncertainty about what I was doing to... having large chunks of it done. The key seems to have been getting over the "activation energy," as it were (sorry, chemistry joke). Today I sat down with the chunk of my essay in which I had to analyze the parts of A Doll's House that were tragic, and after an hour or so it was done and took up most of a page. I even got a cited quote in, and analyzed that. Then I had to take a break, because I think I got too far into my themes and I haven't reached that point!
Yup, this is a personal blog and that was a snapshot of my life. If I have any readers--and I doubt that I do--then thanks for reading my uncomfortably detailed homework summary, and I'll be trying to write more-thoughtful things soon!
If you had seen my grades at the midterm, you would also see that my skills at keeping up with homework have proven to be similarly abysmal for similar reasons.
For this reason, I have decided to solve both these problems at once... by blogging about my homework. Instead of doing it? No, in order to MAKE myself do it. (I may also end up copying over the blog posts mandated for my biology class to this blog, because if I'm going to work that hard I want to be able to go back and see it again!)
So, here I shall implement my counterintuitive solution to the problem of homework by describing what I have accomplished today.
This morning, I took two tests: one as part of my computer science class this semester, and one immediately after class to prove that I was ready for computer science class next semester. I passed both with fairly good grades, and successfully registered for the next computer science course! Unfortunately, my attempts to register for any courses other than that and Latin have proven fruitless; I'll be talking with a professor to see if I can solve that one tomorrow. (It doesn't make sense; I tried registering for two different sections of Spanish, four or so of physics, and two of math, and it told me they were all full even though I checked repeatedly and the other page claimed there were many seats available! Oh, well... the programming class and love-of-my-life-Latin worked out fine, so it's not too bad.)
My theatre homework has started getting easy on me. I have abruptly gone from utter bafflement and uncertainty about what I was doing to... having large chunks of it done. The key seems to have been getting over the "activation energy," as it were (sorry, chemistry joke). Today I sat down with the chunk of my essay in which I had to analyze the parts of A Doll's House that were tragic, and after an hour or so it was done and took up most of a page. I even got a cited quote in, and analyzed that. Then I had to take a break, because I think I got too far into my themes and I haven't reached that point!
Yup, this is a personal blog and that was a snapshot of my life. If I have any readers--and I doubt that I do--then thanks for reading my uncomfortably detailed homework summary, and I'll be trying to write more-thoughtful things soon!
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